Some years ago, I was the principal of a rural K-12 school. We had a 10th-grader with a long history of not coming to school — ailment after ailment. When her mom managed to get her to come to school, she would cry through every class. At the time, we were worried she was having a mental health crisis.
In hindsight, having spent years studying what actually drives chronic absenteeism, I find myself returning to her story. It wasn’t transportation or a chaotic home. It wasn’t a teacher she couldn’t stand or a class she wanted to skip. Every single class felt unbearable except, as I recall, art. And because she missed so much school, very little work was ever turned in. Her records told the story of an absent student, not a struggling one. There was no trail of failed reading assessments, just a trail of missed days. I wonder now if she was a struggling reader, and if the anxiety of exposing that struggle in front of her peers is what made every class that required her to read, which was almost all of them, feel so overwhelming. If that was the case, her mother never had the information she needed to understand why school was so difficult for her daughter.
Here’s what I know after years in K-12 classrooms and schools: Families want to help their kids succeed. The problem is that we aren’t giving them the information they need to do it.
Is there a perception gap?
There’s a large gap between families’ perceptions of reading progress and where students actually are. A survey of over 1,000 K-12 parents found that nearly 8 in 10 families said they never received suggestions or resources to support their child’s learning at home. That’s not an isolated problem — that’s a nationwide trend. Meanwhile, only 35% of high school seniors are reading at or above grade level on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, and chronic absenteeism rates across all grade levels remain significantly higher than before the pandemic, according to the Urban Institute. Literacy and student attendance are often treated as separate problems. The truth is, they reinforce each other and require a connected response.
Research has shown for years that the seeds of reading success are planted early. A widely cited California study found that just 17% of students who were chronically absent in both kindergarten and first grade were reading proficiently by third grade. Their peers with good attendance showed much higher reading proficiency at 64%. The Urban Institute projects that learning loss at this scale has lifelong consequences, including lower earnings and lower rates of postsecondary attainment. Reading isn’t a problem that announces itself in high school. It builds quietly, year by year, absence by absence.
Districts across the country are investing seriously in literacy right now. Curriculum reviews. Instructional coaching. Assessment overhauls. That work matters.
But most of it stays inside the school building.
Families are home with their kids every night. They want to help. They just don’t know where their child stands, what the district’s literacy plan means for their child specifically, or what they can do at the kitchen table tonight. For families whose home language isn’t English, that distance is even wider.
How to support reading at home
Supporting reading at home doesn’t require a parent to be a reading specialist. It requires information. A family that knows their third-grader is working on building fluency can turn on subtitles when watching TV, read signs and labels together, and let their child tell stories from pictures. Small moments that build real skills.
A family that knows their middle schooler is behind grade level can do something equally important: understand why their child might be embarrassed to read aloud in class, afraid to ask for help, or reluctant to admit they’re struggling. At an age when peer perception is everything, a parent who knows what’s going on can advocate quietly, communicate directly with teachers about the barriers their student faces and help that child feel less alone.
A family that knows their ninth-grader is a struggling reader suddenly understands why school feels so hard across every subject, every period, every day: why they want to stay home; and why they’re failing tests in classes that have nothing to do with English. That knowledge changes the conversation at home. A parent with the right information can say, “I’m not going to let you stay home because it’s only going to make things harder. But I’m going to let your teacher know how much stress you’re feeling,” rather than just accepting the 97th stomachache.
Reading isn’t only a school-hours skill. Kids who read at home, who are read to, and who talk about books, words, and stories with the adults in their lives grow as readers faster. Families are not a supplement to good literacy instruction — they are the third leg of the stool. The students themselves are one leg; schools and strong instruction are another. Without family partnership, it’s too unsteady to stand on its own.
Districts have done the hard work of building literacy plans. The missing piece is making sure that work reaches the people who can reinforce it every single day: families. Until districts address the family engagement gap, they won’t be able to adequately help move reading progress forward. Families need specific, timely student data about how literacy benchmarks compare to their child’s progress, in their home language, with concrete ways to help at home. When educators and families are looking at the same information about the same child, students don’t fall through the cracks: they get seen early enough to matter and change outcomes.
We’re seeing renewed attention to literacy. But reading can’t be a one-off conversation. Families are ready. They’ve always been ready. It’s time we gave them what they need.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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